Arts Weekend with mural trail and pop-up happenings
THE fantastic, award-winning LLAWN – Llandudno Arts Weekend festival returns to the town again this year, over the weekend of September 13-15.
Featuring a colourful mix of visual art, performance, dance, video, music and film, this year’s festival introduces the first mural trail for North Wales, alongside artists and performers from Wales and beyond.
The award-winning festival takes place in various venues around the town, including the iconic LLAWN bathing huts, which will host pop-up performances and art happenings along the promenade.
This year the festival is welcoming a new curator, Megan Broadmeadow, who grew up in Dwygyfylchi and studied at Coleg Menai in Bangor.
Bristol-based Megan, who in 2018 produced a large-scale public spectacle for the National Eisteddfod in Cardiff Bay, will be bringing international artists to North Wales and presenting artists and performers with a strong connection to Wales.
Here are some of the highlights of the festival, among many others to be announced over the coming weeks.
A brand-new mural trail will transform buildings around the town in fresh and unexpected ways.
International and local artists, using the town as their canvas, have been commissioned to create unique new artworks on buildings and hidden spaces. There will be opportunities
for visitors to get involved in both making the murals and hunting them down in unexpected places.
Bicycle Ballet create exhilarating outdoor dance performances on bikes, exploring the joyful highs and gritty lows of cycling.
They fuse dance and physical theatre with visual spectacle, comedy and striking soundtracks.
For LLAWN the company will bring their latest performance ‘Blazing Saddles,’ which tells the story of the moment bicycles first became widely available and women transformed their clothing to be able to ride.
Part performance, part game, and fully interactive, Faceback is a durational live artwork that unfolds over hours or days, setting in motion a series of face-to-face meetings between strangers.
An antidote to online social networking, Faceback plays with ideas of community, face-to-face contact, and control over our own images, setting in train a series of random one-on-one encounters.
Megan Broadmeadow, curator of LLAWN, said: “I was thrilled to be invited to curate this year’s Llandudno Arts Weekend and didn’t hesitate in accepting.
“I have a strong connection to the festival – having both performed and visited it over the years since it started in 2013.
“It’s an honour to be able to invite artists that I admire and to see how they respond to a place I know so well.”